God Is Watching You

Call me cynical, and perhaps a sinner, for having the image of Orwell's Big Brother pervade my mind as I read the rules of St. Benedict. Especially in the chapters where the degrees of humility are discussed, does the emphasis of one's lowliness as a human being, pathetic and powerless in the eyes of God, shine. A passage from chapter 7, for instance, is as follows: "The eyes of the Lord observe the good and the evil and the Lord is always looking down from heaven on the children of earth... our deeds are daily, day and night, reported to the Lord by the Angels assigned to us, we must constantly beware."  God, like Big Brother, is always watching, ready to judge or smite at a whim. Worse than Big Brother, though, is that God can condemn us after we die, and commit us to eternal torment by barring us from Paradise, though St. Benedict would exhort that it is not God's fault, but our own puny fault. 

Most of these rules involve suffocating our own human nature, which is thought-provoking, because didn't God make us in his image? So, if we censor our nature, couldn't we also be censoring the nature God has imbued within us? There is probably a reasonable explanation for this, and I realize that I am definitely showing my non-Christian bias here. St. Benedict's rules are quite austere and inhibit enjoyment of any kind, just to prepare for everlasting, heavenly joy in the afterlife, yet why even be born if not to enjoy the life we are given? Must we force ourselves to be austere for that alleged spot in heaven, sacrificing the life we know to be true, on earth?  

List of Benedict

This level of Bible-thumping always holds me at bay from a text, but Benedict says a bunch of things I can get down with. The whole premise of the text is that Benedict is establishing "a school for the service of the Lord," and the first thing he does after confirming this objective is distinguish the different kinds of monks, half of which are absolute trash, so that's kind of a funny way to start. 

One of the early chapters that was poignant in my opinion was Chapter 4: What Are the Instruments of Good Works. This chapter is a thorough list of ways to behave in accordance with the will of God. It immediately reminded me of my class on the Buddha, because the Buddhists are obsessed with lists. The Buddha's lists are definitely more concise; many of Benedict's bullet points same nearly identical things.     

Even conceding the redundancies, and approaching the text without a real religious backdrop, many of these decrees are still worthy endeavors. For example: "not to become attached to pleasures," "to keep constant guard over the actions of one's life," and "then not to murder" are all pretty decent tid-bits of advice. Some, though, are a little more heavy handed, like "to love fasting" and to attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good one sees in oneself... but to recognize that always that the evil is one's own doing, and to impute it to oneself."

I do believe it is important to bear responsibility for one's own shortcomings in life, considering we all have a handful, but I do not think that it is healthy to internalize everything bad you do and externalize everything good.       

What is Peace?

What is peace? Chapter 12 in Book XIX of The City of God proposed a view of peace that I had never considered: that peace is what every person strives for and because it is everyone's ultimate goal, the manifestations of peace can be vastly different depending on people's differing perspectives. St. Augustine goes on to define several of the different types of peace which exist in the world. Perhaps the most difficult for me to grasp when first reading it was the idea that even war is a form of peace or rather a quest for peace. At first, this seemed like a paradox: how can war be peace? But upon further analysis, St. Augustine’s interpretation of peace is completely logical. Augustine writes “Thus their desire is not that there should not be peace but that it should be the kind of peace they wish for” (866).
Can utopia exist when if someone wishes to change that utopias peace? Augustine writes “In fact, even when men wish a present state of peace to be disturbed they do so not because they hate peace, but because they desire the present peace to be exchanged for one that suits their wishes” (866). So what if someone living in a utopia wished to change the present peace? The example that comes to mind is Omelas and the people who leave because they disagree with the treatment of the child. What if rather than simply leaving, they wished to change the current state of peace? War and utopia don't seem to coincide with each other. If two utopias were at war, the result would be each becoming a dystopia. To avoid dystopian consequences, I became curious of whether there was a “right peace” and a “wrong peace” and if The City of God held the answer.
What is St. Augustine’s definition of Godly righteous peace? 
The answer, as far as I could discern, is that there is “earthly peace” and “eternal peace.” Earthly peace is when man “observes” two things: “to do no harm to anyone, and, secondly, to help everyone whenever possible” (873). Augustine’s idea of peace opposes Plato’s definition of justice because he concludes that justice is not “meddling” in other people's lives. Augustine also states that earthly peace is to be on a pilgrimage towards eternal blessings and peace. One question I had is as follows: is there no such thing as “true” earthly peace, but rather one must accept that a real sense of peace will only come when a person enters the Heavenly City?